Dia
About
Dia is a program for drawing diagrams.
Homepage: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia
Repository: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Dia
Dia is a GNU program, and is Free Software. See the COPYING file for the licence.
General documentation can be found in the doc/ directory.
If you are thinking of contributing (either code or diagrams), please see HACKING.md.
For compilation and installation instructions please see BUILDING.md.
Bug reporting
Report bugs in GitLab https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/issues, check existing issues (open and closed) to check your bug isn't already know (or indeed fixed!)
If the issue is not there, please report it. Otherwise, give it a "thumbs-up". This will us prioritise them.
Contacting us
If you use Dia, we would love to hear from you!
Please feel free to send us comments/feedback/questions on our mailing list: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list
If you don't want to send a full email or just want to say "Hi!", we also hang
out on IRC on GimpNet irc.gimp.org on #dia-editor
channel.
Dia has been inactive for a few years so it is always nice to hear from people (still) using it.
Help Wanted
There is a lot of work to be done in order to bring Dia up to date. Part of the reason why Dia has been around for so long is that it is very stable. We intend to keep it that way.
General contributions
We would love to have more people on-board helping improving Dia. For that, the only requirement is patience :slight_smile:. Software quality comes not from the code itself, but how people develop that code. As such, we need to be very nitpicky with what we accept into master and when.
Do not be offended: we aren't trying to be mean, control-freaks or in any way belittle your work, it's simply that good things take time and there's no way to rush quality. With that in mind, we welcome all contributions, no matter how tiny so please get in touch.
Windows build maintainer
We currently need somebody to look after the Windows builds and packages. Most of us use Linux as our main operating system, so if you use Windows and would like to program on Dia on Windows, for example, getting it running on Visual Studio + Meson, please get in touch. Note that this involves doing full development on Windows and is not limited to just getting it to compile.
MacOS build maintainer
Similarly to the above, we need somebody to ensure Dia builds and runs well on macOS.
Translators & Documentation writers
Dia is translated over at l10n.gnome.org (module: dia), please submit translations there instead of as merge requests
Much of the documentation in doc/ is outdated. We need somebody to go through the documents, check what is good, update them and then maintain them. If you enjoy or want to practice technical writing or would be interested in helping with the translation we would love to hear from you!
Ideally the docs would be rewritten in mallard instead of docbook
Testers
One simple way to ensure Dia works well for everybody is to test it on as many machines as possible. This role is simple and is a very good way to get more familiar with the Dia codebase. Plus, the more people Dia works for from source, the easier it is for package maintainers and the easier it is for anybody to contribute patches:
- Obtain a machine (ARM, ARM64, x86_64, SPARC, doesn't matter) in one or more of the following ways:
- Local laptop, desktop, etc
- Premade box from https://www.osboxes.org/ or similar
- Install a virtual machine from ISO
- Follow the compilation & installation instructions for Dia
- See if you can get all the features of Dia running.
- Try various meson options: https://mesonbuild.com/Configuring-a-build-directory.html
- Try to install dependencies in a different order.
- Try a different compiler
- If anything is off and hasn't been reported before, let us know! If it has been reported, give the issue a "+1".
- If you've tried your best and haven't found anything wrong, also give us a shout :-) Let us know what you tried and why you think there aren't any issues on the machine you tested it on.